Southern Crossings

Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South

Daniel C. Turner

Publication Year: 2012

<DIV>“Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passé. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry’s value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered.     Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a “constant southerness” that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels.     With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly. </DIV>

Published by: The University of Tennessee Press

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I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee at Vanderbilt University—Michael Kreyling, Vereen Bell, Mark Jarman, Sean X. Goudie, and Larry J. Griffin—who helped to shape this project from its earliest stages. Funding for archival research and for dedicated...

Introduction

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pp. xiii-xxxii

“How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.” This sentiment from one of Charles Wright’s most well-known poems, “The Southern Cross” (1981, World of the Ten Thousand Things 43), allows something of the scope of the ways in which...

1. Poetic Historiophoty: Filmic Memory in Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon: A Vision

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pp. 1-21

Robert Penn Warren’s¹ concerns with the limits of literary modernism and the need for a “new language” to match “the new world around us” (2) are made clear in his 1966 Lamar Lecture, A Plea in Mitigation.² It is the visual register of film that provides...

2. Returning the “Undying Cry of the Void”: The Changing Condition of Primal Memory in James Dickey’s Poetry

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pp. 23-46

James Dickey’s¹ early poetry, exemplified in Drowning with Others (1962), exhibits an essential faith in the overwhelming restorative force of merging with the natural world, a power often made manifest in scenes of primal violence and...

3. Many Returns: Forms of Nostalgia in the Poetry of the Contemporary South

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pp. 47-86

Stereotypically, southerners and their literature are known for nostalgia, sometimes even defined by it, and this is one of the most prevalent paradigms of current southern poetry, though much contemporary verse resists this impulse. Nostalgia can take the seemingly...

4. Lost Highways and Ethereal Landscapes: Cartographic Memory in the Poetry of Charles Wright

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pp. 87-119

One of the chief concerns of Charles Wright’s¹ verse is to determine how to use memory to resist the flattening out of memory itself. It is not simply that one may never recover the vividness of lived experience, but that one may never recover the relevance and depth...

5. Ghostwriting the Claims of the Dead: Traumatic Memory in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Verse

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pp. 121-147

This chapter brings into relief a shift away from what Yusef Komunyakaa¹ terms a “neo-Fugitive” aesthetics of apolitical detachment to a literature of confrontation, marking a turn to a poetics that engages fully with a region put to the fires of race- and class-based...

6. Transouthern Hybridities: The Poetics of Countermemory

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pp. 149-188

Speaking to the complexities of transregionality, the contemporary poetics of countermemory, produced by writers such as Kate Daniels, Judy Jordan, Rodney Jones, Harryette Mullen, and Natasha Trethewey, reinvents southernness not merely after the desiccation of the mythos...

Notes

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pp. 189-232

Bibliography

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pp. 233-243

Index

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pp. 245-252

E-ISBN-13: 9781572338944
E-ISBN-10: 1572338946
Print-ISBN-13: 9781572338562
Print-ISBN-10: 1572338563

Page Count: 304
Publication Year: 2012

Southern Crossings

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Poetic Historiophoty: Filmic Memory in Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon: A Vision

2. Returning the “Undying Cry of the Void”: The Changing Condition of Primal Memory in James Dickey’s Poetry

3. Many Returns: Forms of Nostalgia in the Poetry of the Contemporary South

4. Lost Highways and Ethereal Landscapes: Cartographic Memory in the Poetry of Charles Wright

5. Ghostwriting the Claims of the Dead: Traumatic Memory in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Verse

6. Transouthern Hybridities: The Poetics of Countermemory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Research Areas

Subject Headings

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3

Southern Crossings

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Poetic Historiophoty: Filmic Memory in Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon: A Vision

2. Returning the “Undying Cry of the Void”: The Changing Condition of Primal Memory in James Dickey’s Poetry

3. Many Returns: Forms of Nostalgia in the Poetry of the Contemporary South

4. Lost Highways and Ethereal Landscapes: Cartographic Memory in the Poetry of Charles Wright

5. Ghostwriting the Claims of the Dead: Traumatic Memory in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Verse

6. Transouthern Hybridities: The Poetics of Countermemory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Research Areas

Recommend

Subject Headings

Related Content

Welcome to Project MUSE

Connect with Project MUSE

Cover 1

Cover 2

Cover 3